Distributed Adaptive Sliding Mode Formation Control for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a distributed multiple unmanned aerial vehicles formation control strategy based on adaptive sliding mode control. The Lagrange method is used to model the subsystem based on the actual quadrotor dynamics, and the formation consensus protocol is designed under the communication graph containing a directed spanning tree. Moreover, the distributed sliding mode surface and adaptive sliding mode controller are designed to make the state of the system reach the sliding mode surface in a finite time. At the same time the controller estimates the uncertainty and compensates the external bounded disturbance in the system. It is shown that the presented controller has the capability to achieve the stability of each subsystems via Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.